Stylos is the blog of Jeff Riddle, a Reformed Baptist Pastor in North Garden, Virginia. The title "Stylos" is the Greek word for pillar. In 1 Timothy 3:15 Paul urges his readers to consider "how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar (stylos) and ground of the truth."

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Book Note: Ibn Warraq, "Why I am Not a Muslim"

Ibn Warraq (a pseudonym, meaning “son of a papermaker”) is a
Pakistani former Muslim and now secular thinker who has become a leading critic
of Islam. He wrote this book in 1995 in response to threats against Salman
Rushdie and what Warraq believed was a failure among Westerners, in particular,
to defend free speech and to critique Islam. You can watch a video of Warraq sharing his
personal story, while doing a talk on “Why I am Not a Muslim” here.

Warraq offers a sometimes scathing rationalistic,
Enlightenment-influenced review of Islam, covering the historic roots of the
movement, the life of Muhammed, the Koran and hadith, Muslim theology and practice,
the view of women in Islam, and Muslims in the West, among other things. Warraq
writes as a religious skeptic, a modern David Hume, rather than as a Christian
apologist. Indeed, he is just as
skeptical of Christianity as he is of Islam. The back cover has endorsements
from the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Anthony Flew.

Though Warraq says he is not “a scholar or a specialist" (xv), the
book has a scholarly feel to it, with numerous references to primary and
secondary works on Islam. Like the works
of another former-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, perhaps the most intriguing thing
about the book is that is written by someone who knows the theology and
practice of Islam from firsthand experience and finds it wanting.

Here are some gleanings from Warraq’s book:

On Muhammed:

Assassinations, murder, cruelty, and torture must all be
taken into consideration in any judgment on the moral character of Muhammed (p.
99).

On the Koran:

The doctrine of abrogation [the Muslim view that some verses
in the Koran are superseded by later verses] also makes a mockery of the Muslim
dogma that the Koran is a faithful and unalterable reproduction of the original
scriptures that are preserved in heaven. If God’s words are eternal, uncreated,
and of universal significance, how then can we talk of God’s word being
superseded or becoming obsolete? Are some words of God to be preferred to other
words of God? Apparently yes. According to Muir, some 200 verses have been
cancelled by later ones. Thus we have the strange situation where the entire
Koran is recited as the word of God, and yet there are passages that can be
considered not “true”; in other words, 3 percent of the Koran is acknowledged
as falsehood (p. 115).

Muhammed was not a systematic thinker, and it is futile to
look for a coherent set of principles in the Koran (p. 334).

On Islam and
Monotheism:

Far from raising the moral standards of the Arabs, Islam
seems to have sanctioned all sorts of immoral behavior (p. 116).

Enough has been said to show that such a system [Islam] is as
rich and superstitious as any Greek, Roman, or Norse polytheistic mythology (p.
117).

The Muslim doctrine of the Devil also comes close at times to
ditheism, i.e., the positing of two powerful Beings (p. 118).

On Islamic
“Fundamentalism”:

Hence in my view, there
is no difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. Islam is deeply
embedded in every Muslim society, and “fundamentalism” is simply the excess of
this culture (p. 185).

On Islamic Imperialism:

Although Europeans are constantly castigated for having
imposed their insidious and decadent values, culture, and language on the Third
World, no one cares to point out that Islam colonized lands that were the homes
of advanced and ancient civilizations, and that in doing so, Islamic colonialism
trampled under foot and permanently destroyed many cultures (p. 198).

On Islam and Slavery:

Slavery in the Islamic world continued, astonishingly enough,
well into the twentieth century…. There is enough evidence to show that slavery
persisted in Saudi Arabia and the Yemen up to the 1950s. Slavery was so deeply
rooted in these countries that abolition was a very slow process. It was due to
foreign influence that the process began at all. Islam …. has never preached
the abolition of slavery as a
doctrine…. (p. 205).

On Women and Islam:

To see Islam as sex-positive is to insult all Muslim women,
for sex is seen entirely from the male point of view; a woman’s sexuality, as
we shall see, is either denied … or seen as something unholy, something to be
feared, repressed, a work of the devil (291).

Modern reformist Muslim intellectuals—male or female—when
confronted by the apparent backwardness of the position of women (a situation
which has remained stagnant for centuries) have tended to invent a mythological
golden age at the dawn of Islam when women putatively enjoyed equal rights…. These same Muslim thinkers, when faced by the
textual evidence of the inherent misogyny of Islam, are confused and
anguished…. The reformists cannot win on these terms—whatever mental gymnastics
the reformists perform, they cannot escape the fact that Islam is deeply
antifeminist… Islam has always considered women as creatures inferior to men in
every way: physically, intellectually, and morally (p. 293).

On Islam and freedom:

No Muslim country has developed a stable democracy; Muslims
are being subjected to every kind of repression possible. Under these
conditions healthy criticism of society is not possible, because critical
thought and liberty go together (p. 294).

But multiculturalism is based on some fundamental
misconceptions. There is the erroneous and sentimental belief that all
cultures, deep down, have the same values; or if these values are different,
they are equally worthy of respect. Multiculuralism, being the child of
relativism, is incapable of criticizing cultures, of making cross-cultural
judgements. The truth is that not all cultures have the same values, and not
all values are worthy of respect (p. 356).